Books by Benjamin Noys

This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture, in Europe and in the United States.*BR**BR*Treating Bataille's work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys' study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille's work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille's oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille's work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.

We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That's one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven't gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, /Malign Velocities/ tracks this accelerationism as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the cyberpunk phuturism of the '90s and '00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.

Through a series of incisive readings of leading theoretical figures of affirmationism "e; Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou "e; Benjamin Noys contests the tendency of recent theory to rely on affirmation, and especially an affirmative thinking of resistance. He reveals a profound current of negativity that allows theory to return to its political calling.

Western culture has always been obsessed with death, but now death has taken on a new, anonymous form. The 20th Century saw the mass production of corpses through war and the triumph of technology over the human body. The new millennium has opened with global terrorism and the suspension of all human rights in far-flung prison camps.